And yet, cooks play an important role in Grass's early works. In his absurdist 1957 play The Wicked Cooks, the five title chefs beleaguer a count for the secret of his "gray soup," which would appear to be ashes (the kind that come from death-camp crematoria). In his 1960 poetry collection Gleisdreieck, Grass depicts a robust cook brandishing a spoon on the page opposite "Cooks and Spoons," and in the poem itself, if we're not the brandisher, we're the brandishee, curling up in the spoon — "because it was hollow and promised sleep" — on our way into someone else's stomach. In "In the Egg," from the same volume, "We live in the egg," waiting to hatch and hoping someone doesn't crack us into a frying pan. Food in The Tin Drum is life and death. The courtyard children force-feed Oskar their soup of spit and pulverized brick and live frogs and pee. His mother Agnes collapses after seeing the eels wriggle out of the black horse's head on Good Friday, and then she gorges herself to death on fish, the cycle of eating and being eaten having grown insupportable.
For Grass it's all one, a recurring cycle like the endless loop of the paternoster in Too Far Afield. We're perpetually in the Year of the Rat, from the pair who take to the roof in his 1957 play High Water to the heraldic rodent that Racine futilely attempts to expunge in Gleisdreieck's "Racine Tries To Change His Coat of Arms" to the title Christmas present of The Rat — a novel in which Oskar's grandmother Anna Koljaiczek celebrates her 107th birthday by being the only survivor of an atomic blast. "The Eleventh Finger," in Grass's first poetry collection, The Advantages of Windfowl, becomes the 11th finger that Oskar dips into Maria's moss; Gleisdreieck's insurrectionist scarecrows become, in Dog Years, ancient Prussian gods dressed up in old SA uniforms. Grass obsesses equally over white (chefs and nurses) and black (nuns); he can't separate red and white in the blood and snow of "Polish Flag" anymore than he can in the interlocking chevrons on the barrel of Oskar's tin drums.
But it's always two, as well, as the wistful last line of Dog Years — "Each of us bathed by himself" — attests. So it's appropriate that we now have a second English version of Grass's first novel. If it isn't one, it's the other. Perhaps.
Related:
2009: The year in books, Interview: Raj Patel, Creating a legend, More
- 2009: The year in books
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best books the Phoenix reviewed in 2009.
- Interview: Raj Patel
"The opposite of consumption is not thrift but generosity; if you look at happiness studies, we are happiest when we give things away rather than when we accumulate or when we don't spend."
- Creating a legend
The soldiers of the 20th Maine Regiment marched quickly into the night, moving west from Hanover toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1863.
- Scientology defector tells all
If every last allegation that Church of Scientology (CoS) defector Nancy Many charges in My Billion Year Contract is true, then her book should inspire several FBI raids and a Lifetime mini-series to rival any Charles Manson documentary.
- Walk hard
In Joshua Ferris's unsparing second novel, Tim Farnsworth doesn't know why he walks, but nothing but exhaustion can stop him.
- Heart keeps beating
Storytelling is largely about character, and writer Thomas Cobb came up with a doozy when he conceived Bad Blake.
- Power of place
I'd arranged the trip (Dogtown is about an hour and a half south of Portland) because I was planning to write about Elyssa East's new book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.
- Interview: Ozzy Osbourne
Long before he bit the heads off bats and doves, Ozzy Osbourne worked in a cheerless abattoir in the hardscrabble Aston section of Birmingham, England, where for 18 months he held such titles as "cow killer," "tripe hanger," "hoof puller," and "pig stunner."
- A memoir, a tour, and a state coming to grips with slavery
The latest turn in Rhode Island's complicated dialogue with its slaveholding past: a yearlong project encouraging locals to read a memoir by the son of a freed slave.
- A painful case
Is it living in a wishy-washy culture of sheepish PBS humanism and numbing political correctness that makes the nasty, psychopathic amorality — no, immorality! — of Patricia Highsmith's novels so savory and appealing?
- Excerpt: Evening’s Empire by Bill Flanagan
In this chapter, "The Drugs Don't Work," aging rock star Emerson Cutler and his manager, Jack Flynn, are seeking inspiration — and desperately trying to jumpstart his career.
- Less
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